Conscientious Guys Wow Women on the Dance Floor

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Men who hit the dance floor may be revealing more than their
ability to cut a rug, according to a new study that finds women
judge men with conscientious and agreeable personalities as
better dancers.

The study builds on previous research that found women judge the
dance movements of stronger men as more attractive and more
assertive, and that risk-taking men also get pegged as better
dancers. The new research suggests that the information conveyed
by dance is even broader, according to study researcher Bernhard
Fink, of the University of Göttingen, in Germany.

"We argue that personality is — to some extent — signaled via
body movement (dance in particular, as it is the most complex
body movement)," Fink wrote in an email to LiveScience. "If that
were true, it would explain why dance is such a prominent topic
in almost all human societies."

Personality and dance

Fink and his colleagues of Northumbria University in the U.K. had
previously found that
ladies love certain dudely dance moves, particularly a
variation of movements in the neck and the torso. Their studies
use motion-capture technology much like that used in
computer-animated movies to record men's dance moves and transfer
them onto featureless avatars. That technique ensures that the
women watching the dance moves won't be distracted by the guys'
attractiveness or other features.

The findings that women seem able to pick up on factors like
strength and risk-taking from watching just a few seconds
of dance moves prompted the researchers to look at other
personality traits. They focused on the "Big Five" traits,
five basic attributes that describe the spectrum of human
personality.

The researchers asked 48 men between the ages of 18 and 42 to
fill out personality questionnaires that would show where they
fell on the spectrum of each trait. Then the men danced to the
drumbeat of Robbie Williams' 1997 song "Let Me Entertain You."
The music and lyrics were cut out, to prevent the men's love or
hatred of the song from influencing their enthusiasm to
dance.

"Dancing in front of cameras is not easy for many people, and
some 'support' from a drumbeat usually helps them in the
laboratory setting," Fink said.

Agreeable dancers

Next, 53 women between the ages of 17 and 57 watched 15-second
clips of the men's dance moves transposed onto a
computer-generated avatar. Each woman judged each man's dancing
ability on a scale of 1 to 7.

The results revealed that the more conscientious and socially
agreeable a man's personality, the more likely women were to view
him as
a good dancer.

The researchers also found patterns suggesting that extroverts
might be better dancers, while people who scored high in
neuroticism or openness were seen as worse on the dance floor.
But those patterns were not statistically significant, meaning
they could have been the result of chance.

Fink says he believes a larger study sample would provide the
statistical oomph needed to prove that those nonsignificant
traits are linked to a guy's ability to break it down. But put
together with old findings, he said, the new study suggests that
women are sensitive to discerning personality traits that would
be important for both short-term
and long-term relationships.

Likewise, he said, the earlier study on risk-taking suggests that
women are impressed by the dancing of men who are bold
sensation-seekers — maybe not the guy you can trust to stick
around and help you raise a baby, but one who would likely
contribute a healthy set of genes to his offspring.

No faking it

Of course, the research hasn't yet established how, if at all,
women use judgments of dance quality to decide whether to pursue
a potential mate. Future studies will need to ask women to watch
men's dance moves and then decide whether the guy would make a
good long- or short-term partner, Fink said. He and his
colleagues are also interested in turning the tables to find out
what sort of information female dance moves might communicate.

As for whether you can tune your dance moves to look more
consciousness and agreeable, it turns out that Shakira was right:
Hips don't lie.

"If one would like to 'fake' a certain (positive) personality in
order to attract women, this is probably doomed to fail," Fink
said. "An individual's body movement pattern is characteristic
and any attempt to fake it would result in less positive
judgments of that person."

The research is set to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal
Personality and Individual Differences.